SEO and marketing

There is a considerable sized body of practitioners of SEO who see

search engines as just another visitor to a site, and try to make the site as

accessible to those visitors as to any other who would come to the pages.

They often see the white hat/black hat dichotomy mentioned above as a

false dilemma. The focus of their work is not primarily to rank the

highest for certain terms in search engines, but rather to help site owners

fulfill the business objectives of their sites. Indeed, ranking well for a few

terms among the many possibilities does not guarantee more sales. A

successful Internet marketing campaign may drive organic search results

to pages, but it also may involve the use of paid advertising on search

engines and other pages, building high quality web pages to engage and

persuade, addressing technical issues that may keep search engines from

crawling and indexing those sites, setting up analytics programs to enable

site owners to measure their successes, and making sites accessible and

usable.

SEO, as a marketing strategy, can often generate a good return. However,

as the search engines are not paid for the traffic they send from organic

search, the algorithms used can and do change, there are no guarantees of

success, either in the short or long term. Due to this lack of guarantees

and certainty, SEO is often compared to traditional Public Relations

(PR), with PPC advertising closer to traditional advertising. Increased

visitors is analogous to increased foot traffic in retail advertising.

Increased traffic may be detrimental to success if the site is not prepared

to handle the traffic or visitors are generally dissatisfied with what they

find. In either case increased traffic does not guarantee increased sales or

success.

Generating Your Keyword/Meta Tag

In order to get the most out of the AdWords Select program, you simply

must have a great keyword list. If your keyword list is not deep enough,

you will be doomed to pay top dollar on only a few highly-trafficked

phrases that garner top dollar bids. So, what are the steps to developing a

great keyword list?

First things first: you need your core list of targeted keywords and search

phrases. These are the terms that your customers will type in to find your

goods and services. Let’s say you have an online store that sells handheld

organizers like the Palm Pilot. Take a minute and think about how you

would go about searching for a personal digital assistant (PDA) online.

Would you search on the term ‘digital device’? How about ‘PDA’? Maybe

‘Palm Pilot’ or ‘Palm V’? Would you try ‘personal electronics’? My point

is that there are many, many different and distinct search terms that will

get you where you want to go.

So, how can you determine which search terms to use when advertising

your goods and services? Follow these instructions:

1. Write down the top search terms that you can think of that

describe your business or service. I suggest keeping this list on a

spreadsheet if at all possible — this will make it easier to organize

and submit later.

2. Use the Overture ‘Search Suggestion Tool’ to get an idea of the

popularity of each search term and enter this number under a

‘monthly impressions’ column in your spreadsheet. The tool is

located here.

When I searched on our example keywords, I found that those search

terms were recently searched as follows:

seo - 420,800

seo services - 75,982

marketing company - 3,899

3. Use the Search Suggestion Tool to lengthen your list of search

terms. Not only does the Search Suggestion Tool reveal the

number of searches for any given search phrase, it also displays

any closely related search terms